Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  “You’ll do,” Seth said, resting a hand on the apparition’s shoulder. He leaned in close, whispering his instructions into Barclay Raines’s ear, feeding it with the most basic orders. “Make her love you,” he said, knowing it would. When he’d explained the nature of the Rushes to Julie Gennaro he’d called Myrna Shepherd a succubus, a female sex demon. Seth didn’t believe in the Catholic version of Hell, the brimstone and fire landscape of Lucifer, his black wings spread out to cast a shadow across the infernal wasteland. But these things, the Rushes, were as close as the world came to demons, brought to life from the mists of that other place. Damiola had called it the Annwyn. He called it Purgatory; it was more appropriate than Glass Town. It was a crude but accurate description of the supernatural paramour. Night after night, day after day, the Rushes would lie with their victim, weakening them as they fed off their essence. “And don’t let her stop until there is nothing left of her to give,” Seth commanded, condemning Rosie Raines.

  Once those words were inside the conjuration they became its imperative, its raison d’être. They couldn’t be denied. It couldn’t leave this realm before they were carried out and Rosie was spent.

  The apparition turned away from him, toward the house where Rosie Raines was sleeping, and moved away hungry for the kill.

  * * *

  Rosie tossed and turned, the sheets clinging to her bare legs. The mattress was soaked with sweat. She looked up again at the dream, so perfectly realized, as the man she had loved and lost moved up between her legs. It felt so right to have him there, to feel him moving inside her again. There had been no one else. When he’d left her, she had broken; the fragments of her splintered heart beyond ever being glued back together. Eventually she’d stopped dreaming about him or thought that she had. She’d stopped yearning for his familiar kiss and started to forget every little thing that made him him; his taste on her tongue, his sweat, the way he breathed, the shallow-fast inhale-exhale in the darkness as he lay beside her exhausted, the way he chewed on his lip nervously, the way his hair tried to defy its parting, all of the little things she had lived with every day that went with him when he died.

  She reached up to touch his face.

  It was a dream.

  It had to be a dream because of the way the light from certain angles seemed to pass straight through him.

  But it was such a beautiful dream she didn’t care.

  She missed him. So much.

  She’d learned to live with the absence of him, but never without him.

  Which is why when she’d opened her eyes and seen his ghost standing at the end of the bed instead of being frightened she had reached out to him. His shirt was rumpled—it was always rumpled, he didn’t like to waste time ironing when the day would just drop the creases out anyway—and open at the throat and falling away to expose the sweep of his collarbone for a tantalizingly brief second as he leaned forward like they were the most intimate inches of his body, there briefly, then snatched away. She remembered the first time she’d kissed him there, outside the old Latimer Road cinema after their first date almost thirty years ago. It had been one of the last films the old place had ever shown. She’d pressed him up against the wall and kissed the way down the vein at his throat to the bone and along it, little salty butterfly kisses. She’d forgotten about that. Somehow, in all of the living they’d done together and then apart, she’d forgotten one of the most basic and fundamental memories of her life.

  He was cold. So cold.

  She started to ask him if it was cold in heaven, but stopped herself, frightened that the sound of her voice talking in her sleep would be enough to wake her and take him away again. She drew him down, feeling his familiar weight on top of her, and kissed his lips that felt like ether, so soft were they against hers.

  It felt so real.

  But it had never been this heady, this desperate, her body answering to his touch of its own accord, pressing against him, pushing, trying to maintain the sweat-slick contact at all times even as the sheets gathered up around her body pulled away from the mattress by their sex. That wasn’t a word she’d usually use, it had always been lovemaking, making love, but this was more urgent, more carnal than any coupling they’d had before, as though in death Barclay had become some sort of movie star lover, a Valentino or Gable, confident that he knew how to play his wife’s body. She stopped thinking and just focused on savoring the dream. Her breathing quickened, her back arched up away from the damp sheets.

  Rosie’s body wasn’t the tight curves and muscle of youth, it had rounded and softened, lined and sagged with age as she grew into and out of it, but it was still her, more her in fact that it ever had been because it had been her for so much longer, but her dream lover hadn’t aged a day. He was still caught in that perfection of youth. The memory of him was frozen in that moment, with him looking that way, but then she’d never seen an old version of his face. It had never had the chance to crease and wrinkle as it won the lines of life lived hard on the Rothery.

  The moonlight stained a jaundiced yellow by the streetlight swelled to fill the room. Each and every detail of her imagination was perfect and so powerfully precise. The single bead of sweat on his upper lip, the imperfections in his irises, the flecks where Barclay’s beard grew through in patches, even the way he moved, the response of his body to her hands, all of it. She’d never been a particularly imaginative woman—or lover if she were honest—but this dream was so vivid. She was in control of it, too. She was moving in time with him, sharing his rhythms, but acting as well as reacting, reaching up to tangle her fingers in his hair and draw him down, reaching around to place her hand flat against the small of his back and feel his cold, cold skin as he leaned in to greedily suckle at her throat, not just simply tossing her head back and gasping. She let go of his hair, her fingers following the sweat down his spine.

  It was physical, but being dreamlike so much more. It was as though he could see into the deepest most secret parts of her soul and work to satisfy needs and desires she’d forgotten ever having. He might never return, so this dreamtime was it, her chance to do everything she’d ever missed, to savor every moment she’d lost, to feel the way she had felt for one last time, to fall in love all over again, knowing that when she woke she would lose it all all over again.

  “I love you,” she whispered, so quietly she couldn’t possibly wake herself.

  He smiled down at her.

  That look in his eyes, the sheer happiness of the moment, was heartbreaking all over again. How many times could she stand to lose him?

  None.

  Not another one.

  “Don’t ever leave me,” she whispered, her hand resting against his cold cheek. “Not again.”

  She didn’t hear what he said in reply. Being a dream his words were lost in a weird crackle of white noise. Maybe she’d fallen asleep with the television on?

  It didn’t matter.

  For tonight she was complete.

  For her, tomorrow would never come.

  42

  GOING HOME

  The dawn chorus was breaking out all across the city.

  Josh stumbled away from the car, angry with himself for ever being stupid enough to trust Julie, battered from Seth’s beating, and more than anything, exhausted. But not broken. Despite everything, not that.

  His body was driven by primal urges now: eat and sleep.

  A wave of nausea swept over him as he walked way from the creosote-stained fence that ran around the perimeter of the pub’s beer garden. Before he crossed the street and headed back into the Rothery he stopped, needing to lean on the nearest lamppost before he pitched over.

  He looked left then right, out to freedom, into perdition.

  The Rothery: an estate of constant perpetual damnation and ruin, a punishment for the unrepentant Londoners who once upon a better life had dared to think things might be different once they moved into the fancy houses the council were building down by the river. So much for
hope; that existed to be crushed. They were offered up like sacrifices to Lockwood’s clan, willingly, eagerly, all in the hopes that it would be different this time. It wasn’t. The walls around them might be new and shiny, but the same feuds and fears ruled their lives. But Josh was tired of keeping his head down; of keeping away from the gangs of youths clustered on the street corners in their hoodies and tattoo sleeves; of avoiding the skinheads with their beer bellies and bovver boots; of skirting the worst streets where dealers doled out tinfoil squares in return for the addicts’ dole money; of looking at the bonfire piles of bed frames, gutted settees, and foam-stuffed mattresses, planks of MDF and chipboard, shopping trolleys and plastic bags advertising discount grocery stores waiting to burn.

  This was his home and he hated it.

  He rubbed at his temple, closing his eyes rather than looking at the decay that gripped his little patch of England. These were the places in the heartland where the fear and hatred of the immigrant fueled the fracture of hearts and minds. They couldn’t grasp the notion that these foreigners who could barely speak the language and had no qualifications to speak of weren’t taking their jobs and their women, even when it was spelled out for them just how desperate they were, and the difference between the words immigrant and refugee and how rather than fear, these people needed kindness and help. It was too easy to point at the scary headlines and blame ISIS for all the woes of the world, and brand these desperate strangers with the same hate.

  His headache wouldn’t go away.

  He couldn’t remember if the last thing he had eaten was that all-day breakfast in the greasy spoon a couple of days ago, when he’d first seen Eleanor Raines, or not. That couldn’t be right, could it? But that would explain why he felt so out of it. His side still ached where Seth had hit him with that sucker punch. He tentatively felt around the area where it hurt. Something was broken in there, he was sure of it.

  He crossed the road, going home.

  Josh saw an old woman out walking her Yorkshire terrier. He’d seen her a thousand times before and always nodded, a polite little ritual of recognition. She started to smile at him, then took in his discomfort and dishevelment and asked if he was all right. Josh nodded and assured her that he was fine, just tired and that it had been a rough night. He had no idea if she heard half of what he said because her little ball of hair barked incessantly at him until he limped away.

  He saw a handful of people heading into the city to work: not the briefcase-wielding gents of the “City,” but the sandwich makers and the street sweepers, the office cleaners and the shop assistants. Invisible people. A woman looked his way, but she was too wrapped up in her own world to wonder about what had happened to him for more than the briefest glance.

  He reached the mouth of Albion Close.

  He should have felt safe, back on familiar ground.

  Home.

  But the first thing he saw was the open door.

  Sorrow had its limitations, but fear was boundless.

  He ran the hundred yards to the door, every possibility of what was waiting for him on the other side bouncing around inside his mind. And then when he got there he couldn’t bring himself to enter. He stood on the threshold, shaking, only the single possibility left in his mind. He knew what was waiting for him. Seth had promised to strip him of everything he loved.

  Josh called out as he went inside.

  There was no answer.

  He checked downstairs first. Despite the fact that she was an early riser, there was no sign that Rosie had come down for breakfast. No dishes on the draining rack, no cups in the sink. No crumbs from the thick sourdough bread crust on the chopping board. Her tea bag—Darjeeling, she always had Darjeeling with a slice of lemon in the morning—was on the counter beside her favorite cup, left there last thing before she went to bed. There was an eerie silence about the place, he realized, where there should have been the voice of the early morning deejay. He breathed deeply, slowly, steeling himself before he headed upstairs.

  “Mum?” he called again. “Lexy? Hello?”

  No answer.

  He reached the landing. Rosie’s bedroom door was open.

  He didn’t want to go inside.

  He really didn’t want to go inside.

  But he had to.

  Josh stood on the threshold, half-in half-out of the room, struggling to make sense of what he saw.

  Rosie was on top of the tangle of bedsheets, naked, her skin mottled like marble, her mouth open wide in a rictus of ecstasy, hands bunched into fists clawing up the cotton. Her legs were splayed wide, offering sights he could never unsee. But none of that mattered, because the one thing that wasn’t there was life.

  He didn’t move from the doorway.

  Unflattering light streamed in through the open curtains, accentuating the details of death: the skin around Rosie’s lips was chapped and dry, there were dark patches, bruises or love bites, around the bay of her throat and more of them in a hungry line down to the bloated blue-lined breasts.

  He couldn’t look away.

  He willed a single breath to hitch in her throat, for her body to buck and cough and come back to life, but there were no miracles to be found here.

  “I’m sorry, Mum,” he said, meaning it. This was on him. This was his fault. Seth had made that abundantly clear as he walked away and left him hanging. If Josh taken his offer, she’d still be alive.

  Whatever happens now, it’s on you. You did this. I gave you a way out. All you had to do was take it, not try and be clever and piss on my outstretched hand.

  It really was that simple.

  He could pretend it wasn’t. Seth was a bastard and that even if Josh had said he’d stop, give it all up, forget about Eleanor and Glass Town, he would have done this to punish him down the line, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sometimes the old movie quotes were on the money. Pain was a tool for a man like Seth. Tools were to be used.

  The horror of it hit him slowly. The realization that she wouldn’t be down to boil the kettle or use that tea bag on the counter, that she wouldn’t just quickly run the vacuum around or dust the mantel or rearrange the photos there by half an inch then move them back to exactly the same spot a few minutes later, all of those little things that she would never do again slammed into him with all the grace of a hammer to the side of the head.

  Josh fell to his knees and howled, head in his hands. Over and over. Just howled and howled as he surrendered to the grief as it tore at him. It was the most human and inhuman sound.

  The tears came between gasps.

  They weren’t so much stages of grief as harrowing cliffs he plunged off one after the other, battering his body to a pulp on the way down. There was denial, that he simply couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing; there was bargaining as he begged whatever god was left to watch over this fucked-up world to bring her back, to trade their places; there was rage far beyond even the blackest of anger that Seth had come into his home and violated his life in such a brutal manner, leaving his mother like that, shamed, broken, discarded; and there was overwhelming sadness as the cloying grief tore at him and kept on tearing until there was a Rosie Raines–shaped hole in his life for every day to come. There was no acceptance. There would never be acceptance.

  He curled up on the floor beside her bed.

  What I will do is strip you of everything you have ever loved. Everything that’s ever meant anything to you. I’ll take everything you’ve ever cared about, everyone you’ve ever cared about, and I’ll put a torch to them. I’ll burn them until there’s nothing left but bones and ash.

  He didn’t move for an hour.

  He couldn’t. It was as if the rigor mortis was settling into his body, not the one on the bed.

  Finally, he crawled to the head of the bed, and reached up to draw the sheets up over his mother’s body, affording her at least some dignity in death.

  He stood at the base of the final harrowing cliff: vengeance.

  That took al
l the strength he had.

  His world slowly narrowed down from the streets outside in the Rothery, to the house, to the room, to the woman on the bed, and with every heartbeat refocusing on that look on her face. “You burn my life,” he said, his first coherent words in what felt like hours. “And I burn yours.”

  They were easy words to say, but there was little to prevent them from being hollow. Anyone could stand in an empty room and act the big man. But outside these four walls how could he fight back? Everything Damiola had told him was useless without the compact. Without the glass, he couldn’t see through the illusion to find the lenses, so no matter how desperately he wanted to walk out of his mother’s bedroom, find the closest anchor and shatter it into a million tiny pieces, move on to the second and the third and keep going to make sure there was no coming back for that bastard Lockwood, he couldn’t. And even if he could, it wasn’t enough. The idea of time creeping in and slowly catching up with Seth wasn’t enough hurt.

  Josh looked at his mother.

  No, death could never be enough payback for what Seth had done to her, not in a million years, however long that would take to pass in Glass Town.

  Josh pulled the blanket up over her face and walked out of the room, out of the house, and out of the Rothery without looking back.

  43

  GRAVE INTENTIONS

  He didn’t know where he was going until he got there: the cemetery at Ravenshill. The gates hung open. He didn’t venture inside. Instead, he sat down on the bench where he’d first mistaken the magician for a tramp. He put his head in his hands and prayed. What for, he had no idea: guidance? The twisted wreckage of the iron bird to fly again? The spirits of the ancient dead to rise up before him from the dirt with a few words of wisdom or a lost spell of damnation known only to those who have passed? There were no miracles to be had, ghostly or metallic.

  When he looked up, he saw the faded letters that marked someone’s passing. It was the first grave inside the cemetery wall. Looking at the stone, there was no hint of the life the dead man must have lived or the person he must have been, just a dash between the years when it began and ended. That was the important part, where the living was done.